🔗 Citizen Infrastructure Links Digest
🗓 Week of March 23, 2026

This week's links explore how cooperation gets designed — from reverse game theory solving housing to children's assemblies reshaping democracy, plus practical tools for navigating the decentralized web.

📰 Ideas & Arguments

Noema's "The Architecture of Cooperation" makes the case that our hardest collective problems — housing, climate, democratic trust — aren't failures of politics but failures of incentive design. The piece traces how mechanism design (aka reverse game theory) has already produced working solutions, from Montgomery County's transferable development rights to quadratic voting and bridging algorithms.

• How Reverse Game Theory Could Solve The Housing Shortage - https://www.noemamag.com/the-architecture-of-cooperation

New_ Public's Blaine Cook and Josh Kramer argue that AI's real promise for communities isn't moderation or content ranking — it's lowering the barrier for communities to build their own tools. Combined with open protocols, AI-enabled coding could let neighborhoods create governance systems and civic platforms on their own terms.

• AI that helps communities thrive on their own terms - https://newpublic.substack.com/p/ai-that-helps-communities-thrive

👧 Children & Democracy

A strong cluster this week on young people's participation in democratic processes. CRIN surveys the global wave of children's citizens' assemblies — from the Netherlands and Poland to New Zealand and Milan — and announces a new global Children and Democracy Network.

• Making (Deliberative) Waves — CRIN - https://home.crin.org/readlistenwatch/stories/making-deliberative-waves-reimagining-democracy-with-and-for-children

DemocracyNext's Claudia Chwalisz goes deeper with Laura Jane Mowlds (Ireland), Ina Vonach (Austria), and CRIN's Katie Reid on how assemblies give young people genuine agency — not token representation. Available as video and podcast (51 min).

• Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G48qf6qvU20
• Podcast - https://open.spotify.com/episode/2EZgtx0xFeRZBpbKXNGKwN

🔧 Resources & Tools

OpenHaven is prototyping a directory of open protocols organized by real-world needs — identity, communication, governance, mutual aid — rather than technical jargon. Early-stage but worth watching.

• Navigate the Open Protocol Landscape — OpenHaven - https://openhaven.net/prototype/

Brandon Nørgaard published an architecture for mapping infrastructure — a 5-layer pipeline (ingest, normalize, enrich, store, serve) for making ecosystem data from the liminal web, regenerative movements, and civic tech computable and mappable. Built on a curated directory of 60+ ecosystem maps and data sources from the Institute of Applied Metatheory's research project.

• Mapping Infrastructure Architecture - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bNkQC8nsCJs6qnOnT5K1CBFNIWlKqZO1/edit

Newspeak House published their Political Technology Awards — an open, transparent ranking of civic tech projects (AlgorithmWatch, Bellingcat Toolkit, Creative Commons top the list), plus their 543-book library catalog is now browsable online.

• Political Technology Awards - https://2025.newspeak.house/awards
• Newspeak House Library - https://2025.newspeak.house/library

Anthropic and GivingTuesday released a free "AI Fluency for Nonprofits" course — practical skills through a 4D Framework (Delegation, Description, Discernment, Diligence), tailored for mission-driven orgs with limited resources.

• AI Fluency for Nonprofits - https://anthropic.skilljar.com/ai-fluency-for-nonprofits